The Anxiety of Influence: Children’s Books and Their Grown-Up Counterparts

Related Books:

If, like me, you’re a parent to a young child, you probably find yourself reading a lot of picture and chapter books, and then, before your own bedtime, reading different books, ones that feature more adults, more drinking, more ennui. You might believe these books, theirs and yours, to be quite different — but that’s not always the case. Over the years I’ve made connections between my favorite authors and my son’s. Once you see the similarities, you can’t un-see them. So read on, brave adult, if you want the veil pulled from your eyes…

Jonathan Franzen and The Berenstain Bears by Stan and Jan Berenstain

Once you get beyond the shock of how the most famous Bear Family spells its name, you might notice how alike these books are to certain famous American novels written by a certain famous American man. A classic Berenstain story (by the original duo Stan and Jan, not the later, inferior titles by Jan and Mike), contains a lot of back story and exposition, and its lessons — on manners, nightmares, and so on — contain at least one moment of domestic strife and misunderstanding. Like The Corrections or Purity, these are narratives about beasts in human clothing (a la Chip Lambert and Andreas Wolf), and the mother controls not just the household but everyone’s psyches. And like Franzen’s novels, the Berenstain Bear books might meander, reveling in details alternately informative and irrelevant, but ultimately they’re straightforward tales about family. (Also, as a friend pointed out to me recently, JFran sort of looks like a Berenstain Bear. This can’t be coincidental.)

Yanagihara clearly recognizes this connection because she put it in her book: artist JB names his series of paintings of Willem and Jude Frog and Toad, after Lobel’s famous amphibious friends. And, let’s face it, A Little Life is basically Lobel for Adults (now with rape and suicide!) Willem is Frog, the perennial optimist, while Jude is sad old Toad. Like Frog and Toad, Willem and Jude need and love each other despite their differences, and because of them. Toad will keep trying to push Frog away, but Frog will remain by his side. Lobel’s stories, like Yanagihara’s novel, maintains an elegant clarity about the unimpeachable sadness of the world. Plus, Toad’s nice, cozy Toad Hole is the animal equivalent of Willem and Jude’s million-dollar country home.

Kalman is mainly an artist and illustrator for people of all ages, but her children’s alphabet book is a favorite in our household for its cheeky commentary and beautiful, funny drawings. (I would like to live inside her picture of a pink ice-pop, please.) The characters in this book — Roberta Rothschild, president of the Rubber Band Society; cousin Rocky with his list of people who have wronged him — remind me of the Post family in Straub’s novel The Vacationers: they’re sometimes put-upon, often very funny, from Manhattan, and quite lovable. An Emma Straub novel is the literary equivalent of a Maira Kalman drawing; I have no doubt that her forthcoming novel, Modern Lovers, about two families in Brooklyn, will cement this kinship.

You might think you’re super literary, cozying up with Knausgaard’s multiple-tome fictional autobiography after a long day with your toddler. You probably agree with James Wood, esteemed literary critic for The New Yorker, who wrote: “There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard’s book: even when I was bored, I was interested.” But you probably also feel this way reading Richard Scarry’s books, which, like Knausgaard’s, describe so much of the mundane. Do we really need to know about every piece of clothing in Huckleberry’s wardrobe? Also, Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town, with its quaint town squares, its weird cars you’ve never heard of, and its waiters carrying tagines, could only be, like Knausgaard himself, one thing: European.

Have you introduced your kid to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yet? I don’t mean the movie with Gene Wilder (or the remake with Johnny Depp in that creepy bob). I mean the book by Roald Dahl. Shit is fucked up! Charlie Bucket lives in horrible poverty, Wonka is a shut-in maniac with too much money, and the Oompa Loompas are victims of the global economy, trucked in from some far-off land to perform labor cheaply. (I’m not kidding. Wonka performs experiments on these workers! They never get to leave the factory!) Wonka’s crazy schemes and nonchalance about everyone’s endangerment remind me of the nutty heroes of Gary Shteyngart’s novels. (Absurdistan, indeed.) The book’s workplace commentary, so tragic it’s funny, is straight Saunders. In fact, I’d love to see him write a novel from the perspective of an Oompa Loompa. It would be like “Pastoralia” but with sugar and torture instead of a cave fax machine.

So there you have it. I suppose it’s time we just rolled up our sleeves and read the child some Don DeLillo, and at night tucked ourselves in with Hop on Pop. We’re tired enough, aren’t we?

A mail-in card in my copy of “Richtofen’s War: The Air War 1914-1918″ reads, “Please send me your colorful brochure describing all Avalon Hill games and Play-by-Mail kits and your exclusive gaming magazine. I swear that I have the necessary grey-matter to enjoy your games.”

A few weeks ago, in the The New York Observer, Nina Burleighthrew down the notion that the enormous success of Junot Díaz’sThis Is How You Lose Her is undeserved. Díaz is beloved not because he is a great writer, Burleigh argues, but because Díaz is a man, and a man who delights us with tales about dashing players and their hapless women victims.

Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz’s multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?…Mr. Díaz’s wondrous bewitching of prize committees comes at a time when women writers remain wildly underrepresented in publishing, on both the reviewing and the reviewed side.

Normally, I’d be all over this kind of thing. I love talking about the lack of gender equity in publishing (in fact, I did for Bitch Magazine this summer). But I can’t agree that Díaz’s success is gender-based; because yes Díaz is a man, but he’s also a man of color. Critics who say that Díaz would not receive the same warmth, if he was a woman, are overlooking the factor of race.

The VIDA statistics that count the number of women’s bylines versus men’s in prestigious magazines are undeniable: in the last two years, in the publications surveyed, only one-quarter to one-third of bylines went to women. There is no parallel count for writers of color, (anybody want to start one?) though we can count prizes. Since 1917, a total of four men of color have won the Pulitzer: N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color. Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction (Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin), and 16 women have won an NBA, one of them a woman of color. And these numbers are reflected in MFA programs and at writing conferences. For example, I had the great fortune of attending an MFA program with close numbers of men and women, though gender parity did vary from year to year. But over the three years that I attended the program, I can count only seven men of color, and 12 women of color, probably out of about 150 students.* While no stats on gender and race exist for MFA programs, I don’t think that my program was out of the norm. Even at VONA, the annual Bay Area writing conference for writers of color — where, I should disclose, I took a workshop with Junot Díaz in 2007 — the number of women attendees outstrips the number of men. I’m not trying to say that publishing isn’t difficult for women; I’m simply trying to say that it ain’t easy for men of color either.

However. I don’t need to dazzle you with depressing numbers to make my case. I could just point out the fact that in our culture, the stereotypes associated with men of color don’t exactly make room for the kind of insight, expressiveness, and artsyness we associate with writers. Instead, these stereotypes expect men of color, particularly African American men and Latino men, to be hypermasculine and violent, and little else. They expect East Asian men, South Asian men and Arab men to be computer nerds, cab drivers, or terrorists, and not poets; Native American men are expected to be drunk.

It surprises me that only a few months after we were all wearing hoodies for Trayvon Martin, we can overlook the fact that race is a terrifyingly high obstacle for men of color. Of course, some of the greatest wordsmiths, storytellers and social historians of our time have to come to us through hip hop — like Big L, Biggie, Jay-Z or your preferred MC of choice — but thanks to the racialized wariness that often meets hip hop in the mainstream, you will rarely hear these men of color described adoringly by the arbiters of literary culture.

While I emphatically agree that gender is a barrier in publishing, taking out our sense of injustice on men of color is barking up the wrong tree. It would make more sense for us to think about how the barriers we face are parallel, and to try working on the unfairness in publishing together.

But Nina Burleigh aside, what really struck in the craw of my Twitter feed is not the fact that Junot Díaz is a man, period, but rather that he is a man who is being rewarded for writing love stories about characters who are mysteriously close to himself. The argument runs that women aren’t allowed to write about love, especially not in a confessional way — unless they want to get shelved under “Chick Lit” instead of “Prize Winners.” This holds more water for me. Still, I can think of multiple women writers who write about love and their own lives — and who gracefully demonstrate the impact of gender on their love and their lives — just as Díaz does. Like Mary Gaitskill, for example. Or Alice Munro. (There is even a biography of Alice Munro that charts how much her stories overlap with her own life.) It is no coincidence that Gaitskill, Munro, and Díaz all write stories that are so innovative, heart-breaking, and thrilling that they dwarf those of their contemporaries. While it is hard for anyone to write a good story, and harder still to get that good story published, more often than not people who are marginalized have to perform at a higher level than the norm in any field, to overcome the bias that might otherwise count them out.

And to call Junot Díaz’s stories “love stories” seems a little tongue in cheek. They are more like unlove stories: they chronicle one Dominican American man’s inability to overcome the patriarchal expectations on himself, which he then turns on the women in his life, leading to eventual bleak and total emotional isolation. (Could Díaz be addressing those expectations of hypermasculinity; the ones that also make it hard for men of color to be seen as artists?)

Going on what Díaz admits about his personal life, the stories may be confessional, but they aren’t masturbatory or without purpose; instead they manage to maintain that almost impossible balance between beautiful writing, and politics. A quick read of stories like “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” “Alma,” or “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” might yield the belief that Díaz’s character, and Díaz himself, are pigs and misogynists. For sure, some readers I know can’t even get past Yunior’s addiction to ethnic and sexist slurs. While I don’t share the sentiment, I can sympathize with the desire to carve out a space in one’s life that is free from such language, as loaded, painful and constant as it is in our everyday lives.

But I have trouble understanding how a willing and careful reader could miss the fact that almost all of Díaz’s stories are cautionary tales about what happens to men who refuse to lay down their male power, in order to see women as human. When Nina Burleigh says, “Díaz’s alter ego is utterly beholden to his wandering penis, yet never examines his compulsion to bone everyone in sight,” I wonder if we were reading the same book. This is How You Lose Her’s biggest joke, and biggest tragedy is this: Yunior’s thesis is that he’s “not a bad guy,” and yet the tales he tells about himself are merciless in proving the opposite. Yunior may not “examine his compulsion[s]” but the stories do; unflinchingly. Yunior is a bad guy, and his refusal to take responsibility leads him to the worst ending of all by the book’s close: the inability to connect.

Because Díaz’s work is so concerned with masculinity, it is hard for me to imagine “the female Junot Díaz” — that woman writer who writes just like he does, but doesn’t receive the accolades he does. The fact that Díaz is so uniquely himself as a writer compounds this issue. Does the question work in reverse? Who is the male Mary Gaitskill? The male Alice Munro? (Chekhov, Cynthia Ozick says.) Zadie Smith and ZZ Packer seem like possible counterparts for Díaz — though their accolades are intact — for their blend of humor and tragedy and high and low culture, and their investigation of the impact that race, gender and class have on love and family.

For me, the magic of Junot Díaz is that his stories work on more levels than I can keep track of. The way he writes race and gender is radical, but what he does with words is so enchanting that a reader who doesn’t care about race and gender can still be swept away. Among the great gifts of his work is the common space it opens up. Michael Bourne wrote in September that Díaz lets all readers share in his space, whatever their background: “…no matter what racial madness was happening on the page, I as a white reader always felt included among his boys, the ‘you’ in his stories always seemed to include me.” While this is not the point Bourne is trying to make (and you should read his review because his point is more insightful and complex), Díaz’s writing does indeed put the bros at ease, because Díaz is simultaneously critical of machismo, while still being macho. And so conversations about race and gender with white writers or male writers that I would otherwise find stressful, risky, because I am a woman writer of color — especially if we’re talking about less bro-friendly writers like (God forbid) Alice Walker — miraculously become open and relaxed, if we’re talking about Yunior. Here Díaz gets to have his cake and eat it too, and that could be what annoys feminist writers. A woman would never get high fives for criticizing the patriarchy; that I can definitely agree with. But. Could I be irritated that we can’t have the same kind of relaxed conversations in the context of Louise Erdrich, Edwidge Danticat, or even Edward P. Jones, because they don’t make the bros feels as safe as Díaz? Sure. But I’m still wildly grateful for that space that fits both me and the literary bros. Seriously, that’s a magic trick and a half.

And yet, this common space can be dangerous, because it’s too easy. If I were to entertain the notion that something other than Díaz’s colossal talent is behind his success, I would guess that prize committees bequeath their approval on Díaz, because a bonus comes from association with him, outside of his cred as a writer.

Loving Díaz can be like slipping Kanye lyrics into conversation or cushioning racist comments with references to your black best friend: it allows white readers a reprieve from white guilt. A fantasy world opens up, where racial difference is elided, and you can be absolved of the crimes associated with white privilege by raving about Junot Díaz, or by giving him a big prize.

Sure, the cynicism behind this sentiment is as ugly as Burleigh’s crass dismissal of Díaz’s worth. But the fact of the matter is that neither my cynicism nor Burleigh’s misplaced anger is going to go away any time soon; not until the landscape of publishing shares more of the power, and lets in the people that it has shut out.

__
*The total number of students in my program at any time was 80. The number 150 is a rough guess that includes any students who overlapped with me, and graduated before me, after me or with me.

3 comments:

High concept and high marks. This is such a good idea and so well done that I’m going to quibble slightly. A closer Knausgaard comp is Rotraut Suzanne Berner’s very Scarryesque In the Town All Year ‘Round. Equally charming, equally mundane, and the trump card–it’s actually European.

The transaction is fraught with expectation and fear, hope and anxiety. If it goes badly, the simple offer of pages to read can shake relationships, unsettle marriages, and open wide rifts between partners, lovers, friends.

One morning at work, I tried to sign on to my email account and had a door slammed in my face. Google interpreted something in my emailing activities as a possible security risk, and decided to lock me out of my Gmail account for 24 hours. Naturally, I panicked, then opened a Microsoft Word document and began to write this.

A subgenre of confessional personal essay has grown from the seed of technical disasters just like mine: the Technology Fails Essay. (In my own essay, right now, I’d be talking about my frantic attempts to access the account by restarting my computer, as if I could trick the internet that way.) Most of these essays appear in online literary magazines, and they are probably so prevalent because the writers no longer have Twitter or Facebook or Gmail to distract them from writing. The essays aren’t shallow, though, because the immediate reaction to technological failure is a deeply emotional one, whether the emotion is desperation, anxiety, fear, or despair.

(In my essay, I’d be writing about my frantic Twitter posts and Facebook status updates, chronicling my Gmail woes and instructing all my friends and followers to email me on my work email account for the rest of the day.)

During these terrifying technical blackouts, writers sometimes look inward, to comment on their own addiction to all the bright, shiny technology. (Once my most important email account was unreachable, I realized that I had five other email accounts, each for a specialized type of correspondence. My email-account-creation-behavior is obsessive compulsive and has gotten completely out of hand. I must make changes in my lifestyle.) These writers treat technology like low art – we love it, but know that it’s not “good,” but we can’t easily explain how it’s not “good,” so we spend pages and hours and thousands of words trying to explain ourselves, when all we really want to do is curl up around a Nicolas Sparks novel (not me, but I’ve heard they sell well) or re-watch Bring It On (this example is taken from personal experience).

Sometimes in these blackout-essays, the writer takes a broader look at our world’s dependence on technology to function. Sometimes, they write a personal history story about their relationship with their tech. (I remember my first blackout, back in ’03, when Livejournal was inaccessible for a whole day and my entire high school freaked out.) Sometimes the writer uses blackout essays as a metaphor for distance or being cut-off from the world.

Why are these stories compelling? Is it because they give shape to a shared experience? Does a Tweeter who was frantic during a Twitter blackout want to read about another frantic Tweeter because it makes them feel less alone in this isolated world of Internet socialization? We’ve all been there: our phones have broken and all of our contacts lost forever, our computers have crashed, our Gmail accounts have been temporarily closed to guard our security when it didn’t need guarding. Maybe reading about other people with the same problems makes each of us feel like a citizen of the world behind our keyboards.

Personally, I’m starting to find this kind of essay tiresome, but I don’t understand why. I can read four blogs from four different television critics breaking the same news story in four nearly-identical ways – and I keep going back to all four writers day after day after day. I can empathize with the writers bemoaning their technologic issues; I should feel more with every new essay, not less.

(The next morning, I logged on to my Gmail, good as new. I hadn’t received any urgent messages during the time I was shut-out of the account, so I didn’t even explain my problem when I was writing responses. Now that the email account was restored, I felt even more like writing and contextualizing my experience, but I didn’t know where to begin. Not being able to access my email made me stressed out for 24 hours, and if it had happened to anyone else, they would’ve been stressed out too. But it wasn’t a shot heard round the world, it barely echoed. The pain and stress of the problem was all inside of me, and the world couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t empathize, because they were logging on and sending off emails so easily, while I waited for Google to give that back to me.)

When my technology fails, the lack of it consumes me. When someone else’s technology fails them, I am vaguely sympathetic, but I’m losing my ability to feel anything in response. Their problems wash over me, because it’s so simple to put contacts back into a cell phone, and if they were smart they would’ve backed up their computer files, and what are you bitching about anyway, your email will be back in 24 hours, just wait it out, it’s not that big of a deal.

John Cheever may be the most misunderstood and miscategorized important American author of the 20th century. On three separate recent occasions, and many more times over recent years, I have read articles/interviews that group him stylistically with Raymond Carver. This is mystifying: one would be hard-pressed to think of a body of work more antithetical to Carver’s spare, working-class realism than Cheever’s elegant, upper-class fabulism, where nymphs come to life and families vacation in Italian seaside villages. I can only guess this very bad comparison stems from people not actually having read Cheever, while knowing that 1) he and Carver were drinking buddies at Iowa, and 2) both of their names begin with C and end with VER.

He is often also (mis)paired with Richard Yates, a more understandable comparison. Both men served in the Second World War and chronicled the roiling fault lines beneath the tranquility of New York’s far suburbs. Both men were impeccable stylists, although Yates tended toward a rhetorical stylishness powered by limpid prose, while Cheever was, like John Updike, an extravagant sensualist, both in subject matter and descriptive tendency. Both men enjoyed their greatest success with novels, while exerting their greatest artistic mastery in the short story form.

But Yates’s world, however dated it may be in 2017, is the world we live in. Cheever’s is not our world and never was. I have no way to verify this, but I suspect in the ’50s he was misread as well, though misread more widely. He seems to be writing about the Westchester suburbs — Shady Lawn and Bullet Park, with their sloping lawns and cocktail parties populated by characters recognizable as ur-Don Drapers, ur-Roger Sterlings. Except as we read, the landscape distorts, the familiar becomes strange. Cheever’s stories are, to put it simply, strange, and in them, the Mad Men may really be mad.

Take “The Swimmer,” his most famous and familiar. Neddy Merrill, half-cocked on gin and tonics during a restorative summer brunch at the house of some friends, decides to return home through several miles of Connecticut exurb by swimming the lengths of contiguous pools. Thus begins a minor odyssey during which we watch as Neddy makes his way, first in drunken delight, but then through rainstorms, colder weather, and the hostility of former friends, gradually growing old and infirm, finally arriving home to find it deserted.

What is going on here? In fiction, when unreal elements appear, usually one of two things is happening. In the first case, the unreal actually is real. This describes much of genre fiction, in which the reader expects vampires and aliens to appear — would, in fact, be disappointed if they didn’t. In literary fiction, too, the unreal may be introduced with a straight face, for effect. Magical realism depends on the introduction of a fantastic element into otherwise grim reality, for instance in Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” The appearance of an angel in a poor Colombian village creates a host of consequences, though a crucial difference between magical realism and, say, fantasy, is that in magical realism the narrative is primarily interested in the village, while in fantasy the author would focus primarily on the old man, his wings, how he got them, and what his home world is like.

More typically, in literary fiction, the fantastic occurs as a manifestation of the main character’s disordered psychology. In close third person, the narrative is so intimately linked to a protagonist’s point of view that the world appears in subjective terms, and if the main character is sufficiently disoriented — drunk, delusional, or simply experiencing very heightened emotion — aspects of their immediate surroundings may become distorted in a way that reveals their mental state. In William Kennedy’sIronweed, Francis Phelan, an itinerant, guilt-wracked alcoholic sees the ghosts of dead people he’s known, some of whom he killed. Although the narrative never states that they are apparitions deriving from his fear and shame, it doesn’t need to: we are able to read them as having a kind of immediate corporeality, at least to Francis, while still being utterly unreal, figments.

So which of the two is happening in “The Swimmer?” Well, neither, really. On the one hand, it is impossible to read “The Swimmer” and think that the main events of the story are happening as described — that, in the course of a single afternoon, a man ages 30 years while becoming increasing destitute and reviled — unless we believe Neddy Merrill has entered some horrific parallel universe. On the other hand, it is equally impossible to read the events of the story as merely a manifestation of Neddy’s mental state. He’s been drinking as the story starts, but not that much. He is happy, overwhelmingly content in his life, really. Even if we were to read the story as a projection of Neddy’s subsumed life anxieties, it is impossible to imagine him projecting a vision of the world this entirely altered.

Neddy finds himself in a third situation, a Cheeverian zone of strangeness between the actual and imagined, crucially of both and neither. Although Cheever makes frequent use of mythical tropes and creatures, it is not myth, not purely figurative. It is not magical realism because the strangeness is not intended to be taken literally — strangeness in magical realism is almost always encountered and acknowledged by multiple characters, and is, in fact, a device meant to comment on the interlaced relationships that form a society. Strangeness in Cheever performs the opposite function: it is personal, particular, atomizing.

In another well-known Cheever story, “The Enormous Radio,” a Manhattan couple buy a radio, and enjoy it until it begins picking up the conversations of neighbors throughout their building. The wife becomes obsessive, the husband guilt-ridden. It threatens to destroy their marriage and is returned. As with “The Swimmer” — because the other elements in the story are so prosaic, so local and identifiable — it is very hard to read the story as intending the reader to believe in a magical radio. But also like “The Swimmer,” the events of the story are too sharply defined and internally consistent to be written off as mistake or delusion.

The closest available description is dreaming — Cheever’s protagonists often feel as though they’ve slipped into a dream, their own or someone else’s. And yet this doesn’t seem exactly right, either. The fantastic does seem to be happening, but in an intensely subjective sense, as characters’ fears and desires warp the sturdy fabric of their previously staid realities. Cheever’s preferred locales — Manhattan, Ossining, Italy — deform like wax effigies, exposed to the heat of a character’s sudden lusts.

This deformation is grotesque and startling in stories like “The Swimmer” and “The Enormous Radio,” and in less famous pieces like “The Chimera” and “Metamorphoses.” But many of Cheever’s less fantastic works operate in the same mode, if quieter. “The Country Husband” begins with Francis Weed nearly dying in a plane crash. He returns to Shady Hill to find everything subtly altered — more vivid, shot through with erotic feeling, uncomfortably alive. This reads as standard narrative strangeness, i.e. a man has undergone trauma and found his perspective changed. But the next evening, Francis and his wife attend a neighborhood cocktail party, and we find ourselves in a zone of distorted reality. Francis suddenly recognizes the neighbors’ maid: when he was serving in France during the war, a French woman who’d been having relations with a German officer was forced to march naked through the town square. The maid is that woman.

Normally, we would ascribe such an unlikelihood as a misperception on Francis’s part, but Francis asks after the maid and the hostess confirms she was hired from the same small town in Normandy — Trénon — where Francis had been stationed. Misperception is eliminated as an explanation — it is, we are reassured, the same woman. But this seems wildly improbable, especially given that Francis has just had a paradigm-shifting experience, one that has tilted him toward the mysterious and sensual. A woman is sexually humiliated during the war; years later she reappears in a Westchester suburb, pouring brandy and coffee and serving as an emblem of the main character’s thwarted sexual energy, which later manifests itself in clichéd lust for the babysitter.

While many writers could write the near-crash and subsequent vivification of their protagonist’s senses, it is uniquely Cheever to present the maid as a new fact of the landscape and leave the reader to deal with it. What is she doing there? She is real and she is impossible, or so improbable as to amount to the same. Again, like a heavy ball bearing rolling across a piece of tautened cloth, the weight of a protagonist’s anxious desire seems to have distorted the physical reality of his surroundings. In the end, Francis visits a psychiatrist and addresses himself to basement woodworking, a wholesome pastime that also sees him sequestered from the outside world — not in self-protection, but rather, one senses, protecting Shady Hill from himself in a kind of erotic quarantine.

The cumulative effect of these individual fantasias is, paradoxically, a strengthening of the apparatus of social realism in Cheever’s work. As in “The Chimera,” when a dream woman emerges from the woods surrounding the home of an unhappily married man, these events are oppositional in nature to the backdrop of reality and routine. The plots of many Cheever stories are, in effect, aberrations, and they do not last. The maid vanishes into the unnoticed shadows of suburban domestic life, and the radio is returned to the store. The fantastic in Cheever is intense, but it is not durable. In the end of most Cheever stories, the force of social expectation tends to smooth these abnormalities over, though it is not always clear how we’re meant to feel about this. At times we sense an opportunity lost; at times the story itself seems to breathe a sigh of relief as the normal rhythms of life reassert themselves.

As a social critic, Cheever can be read, therefore, as simultaneously transgressive and conservative. On the one hand, the twin treadmills of suburban family life and postwar American consumerism stifle the human spirit. These visions represent a reaching beyond the borders of societal expectation for something rare and ineffable: sexual, religious, often both. The implication being that there is no adequate means for people to fulfill themselves within the boundaries of their normal life. Once a Cheever protagonist deviates, they deviate wholly, as in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” in which Johnny Hake is fired and begins plundering the homes of his neighbors for cash. A corollary implication here would be how thin the line is between normal and the freakishly abnormal, how little occupiable space exists between the two.

But this view of life, with the forces of madness held at bay only by an adherence to work and marriage is, itself, inherently conservative, in both its diagnosis of disease and prescription for cure. After all, given a binary choice between dull routine and utter chaos, most people will chose the former, and this mostly holds true in Cheever’s stories. Johnny Hake is wracked with guilt and, reinstalled in his previous position, returns the money he’s stolen. Francis Weed takes up penitent basement carpentry as a dull corrective while outside, dryads caper in the moonlit shadows of his garden. In a similar backyard, the Chimera, Olga, emerges a last time from the edge of darkened woods, staggering and bleeding, seemingly battered by her imaginer’s self-judgment.

It is the tension between these two countervailing urges — the urge for freedom and the urge for safety — that lends Cheever’s work much of its enduring power. Though social norms have changed dramatically in the 50 years since his heyday, we still negotiate this axis of desire in our lives. We still veer wildly into chaos and overcorrect back into predictable routine. To survive the mundane crush, we daily create little fantasies that must be destroyed by nightfall.